'S.N. Bose laid foundation for Nobel Prize-winning work'

Rathindranath Bose, eldest son of Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose, after whom the sub-atomic particle Higgs Boson is named, Wednesday expressed pleasure that his father's work spurred others and helped win honours.

Britain's Peter Higgs and Belgian Francois Englert were Tuesday awarded the Nobel Prize for their work on the Higgs Boson -- popularly known as "God particle", a key element in scientists' theories explaining the makeup of all matter.

Boson - a type of elementary particle - was christened so to commemorate the research carried out by S.N. Bose in collaboration with Albert Einstein that theorises properties of these particles.

The Higgs Boson is a boson associated with the Higgs field -- an energy field that influences the mass of substances passing through it.

Though Bose did not get recognised with the prestigious award, his work has spawned a generation of scientists in the quest of the elusive "God particle", whose discovery was confirmed at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland earlier this year.

"His work cannot be judged in terms of any award... we have seen how significant his work is... so much so that other scientists whose works are based on his monumental research are getting the Nobel... it has become a part of textbooks," Bose's son said.

Higgs and Englert have shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm Tuesday.

The Nobel was awarded to the two scientists "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider," said Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Earlier this year, researchers operating the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator confirmed that a particle discovered in the experiment is indeed the Higgs Boson, a key element in scientists' theories explaining the makeup of all matter.

However, Professor Bikash Sinha and Bose Institute director Sibaji Raha here Tuesday expressed their displeasure at four other researchers missing out on the prize.

Raha regretted that four other contributors -- Robert Brout, Gerald Guralnik, C. Richard Hagen and Tom Kibble -- did not get recognition for their "equally significant" work on the same subject.